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Why It Looked Like the Apocalypse Came to Australia Last Week

Cyclone Narelle turned parts of Western Australia blood-red last week with iron-rich dust and eerie light scattering.

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The world feels like a nightmare. So, of course, Australia, a country with a nearly cartoonish association with the horrors of Mother Nature, would experience a fairly common weather phenomenon with some very uncommon, deeply disturbing side effects that made it seem like the world was coming to an end.

For a brief moment this past week, portions of Australia were blanketed with deep, blood-red skies. It wasn’t the end times. It was just Tropical Cyclone Narelle.

As Narelle approached the western coast of Australia, the skies over cities like Denham turned an ominous red. This prompted residents to break out their cameras to document the freakish occurrence before quickly and quite sensibly rushing back inside, should it start raining frogs or be swarmed by locusts.

What Made Australia Look Like the Apocalypse Last Week

It’s hard to believe anything you see on the internet anymore. But this sudden apocalyptic reddening of the skies wasn’t AI trickery. It was just dust—a lot of it. The region’s soil is rich in iron oxide, which is essentially rust, the same stuff coating Mars. Its landscape has a natural reddish tone. When strong winds from the cyclone swept across its dry, reddish lands, they lifted massive amounts of the fine, rusty dust into the atmosphere.

That explains the red, but what about the eerie glow? That trick is explained by how light behaves when it hits those dust particles. Under normal conditions, sunlight scatters in a way that allows blue and shorter-wavelength light to dominate. But when the air is thick with dust, especially particles similar in size to light wavelengths, longer wavelengths like red and orange push through more easily. The result is a sky that looks more like Mars than Earth.

It’s a rare phenomenon, but not unheard of. Cyclones usually bring tons of rain, which tamps down the dust. Narelle was a bit unusual in that it passed over especially dry regions before the rains kicked in, allowing it to kick up debris. All the heavy cloud cover of the cyclone amplified the effect, dampening direct sunlight and spreading that creepy red hue evenly across the landscape for as far as the eye could see.

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